‘One more move,’ Leon warned, brandishing the stapler and making his point with a couple of shots at the ceiling.

Oli groaned as Daniel helped him off the table.

‘Suppose we’d better take you to hospital,’ Daniel said, as he tore white tissue out of a dispenser. ‘Wrap this around your hand.’

‘I’ll drive,’ Leon added, rattling the keys to the Volkswagen.

17. PAWN

Freja was a Dane by birth: witchlike grey hair and somewhere in her early sixties. She moved like she was younger as she opened the door of her small shop. It was in a side road, close to Birmingham New Street station, and a customer in a suit wanted to get in as she stepped out, carrying a freestanding sign that read, We Buy Gold for £££.

The customer wanted a watch battery. Freja opened dozens of tiny plastic drawers behind the shop counter until she found the right size. She charged four pounds and offered to fit for free, but the man was in a hurry and said he’d do it himself. As she put the day’s first takings in the till, Freja heard the bell over the shop door jangle, and saw two large men reflected in a glass cabinet full of second-hand camera equipment.

‘Good morning, gentlemen.’

Trey had spent much of the previous evening in casualty. There was bandage under his tracksuit bottoms where three staples had been removed. His big hands drummed on the counter.

‘Kid came in yesterday,’ he began. ‘Stocky lad. Four MacBook Airs that belong to me. Don’t want no fuss, I’ll pay back whatever you paid the kid.’

In the background, Trey’s driver pulled a roll of fifty-pound notes.

‘Six hundred, wasn’t it?’

Freja stiffened up, giving the impression that she’d dealt with plenty of situations like this before. At the same moment, the driver bolted the shop door and flipped a sign to closed.

‘No laptops or other high-value items are kept on these premises,’ Freja said. ‘I wasn’t working yesterday. But if my colleague purchased a computer, it will have been passed on to our reseller. They either strip the equipment for parts or wipe all the data and sell them on eBay.’

‘Can you get them back?’ Trey asked. ‘There’s data on those machines that is important to us. I’ll even give you an extra two hundred pounds for your trouble.’

Freja smiled slightly at this prospect. ‘Let me check.’

The elderly Dane had yet to boot up the ancient Windows PC behind the till.

‘You often pay money to kids bunking off school?’ Trey said, trying to sound vaguely threatening. ‘You’re lucky I didn’t go to the cops.’

Freja gave a stiff smile, as she logged into the computer and started going through a database of invoices for the previous afternoon.